The cash supply chain is manual, complex, has inherent risk issues, and is dispersed throughout a network of customers, armored carriers, the Fed (Federal Reserve), and/or a network of client facing devices including but not limited to automatic teller machines (ATMs), cash handling facilities, banking centers, safes, and cash recyclers, and other cash handling devices. The costs of depositing, distributing, and managing cash across a major bank, as well as the amount of daily excess cash carried by such a bank, can be on the order of billions of dollars.
Today's client deposit process does not adequately allow clients to view the status of their deposit bag as it makes it way from the client's site where the deposit was prepared to the financial institution or financial institution's representative and potentially on to proof and bulk file. The proof and bulk file is the processing and storing of checks. Oftentimes, a deposit will contain cash and checks (and possibly other negotiable instruments). The deposit arrives at a deposit handling facility and the deposit is “split” into the cash and the checks. The cash is processed within a cash handling facility and the checks are processed through proof and bulk file.
Deposit bags are handled multiple times in the end-to-end cash supply process, which increases potential errors, opportunity for theft, and complicates finding missing transactions or understanding where errors occurred and assigning fiduciary responsibility for those errors. Pertinent pieces of deposit data are typically manually entered and reentered into various systems throughout the end-to-end processing of the deposit. The collaboration and sharing of information across multiple organizations and with multiple vendors may make this process very complex and increases risk to the financial institution and its customers/clients.
Typically, deposit bags arrive at a cash handling facility and the cash is counted by hand, and then reconciled with a paper ledger provided by the armored carrier. The armored carrier must wait until the manual count of the deposit bags matches the paper ledge and all errors are reconciled. Only after the deposit bags are reconciled with the paper ledger, may the deposit bags be assigned to a teller for counting, inspection, and/or redistribution. Deposit bags are manually assigned to tellers and workflow is managed based upon a human manager making subjective decisions regarding a particular teller's workflow capacity. The teller must take each deposit bag to a teller station and manually enter the declared amounts of cash and negotiable instruments that are present in the deposit bag before the teller is allowed to begin verifying the cash. Once the teller verifies the cash, the cash may be taken to a sorter room for sorting may be further processed, counted, inspected, or the like. The cash then “strapped,” which is a process that gathers a particular amount of cash and physically secures a cash strap around it. Strapped physical cash is stored within the cash handling facility. This entire process is expensive, time-consuming, and prone to errors.
The contents of deposit bags are assigned to tellers for processing at the cash handling facility. A person, such as a workflow manager, often controls the distribution of the deposit bags and/or its contents to a particular teller based upon subjective analysis of the teller's workload and/or work capacity. The workflow manager may not know what contents are in the deposit bags and may assign the deposit bags for processing by a teller without consideration for the level of priority (urgent, low-priority, etc.) at which the contents need to be processed. The workflow manager is not able to prioritize the processing of the deposit bags nor is the workflow manager able to select the best teller for processing the deposit bag. Such a system is inefficient, error prone, and increases costs associated with processing these deposit bags.